The new dataset is enabling the researchers to improve climate prediction models for West Africa, which in turn will help to forecast farming success and disease outbreaks in the region. They are are now extending the project to coastal areas of West Africa.

Crop forecasts will be produced by the AGRHYMET (Agrometeorology, Hydrology and Meteorology) centre in Niger. The forecasts could allow the millions of people who depend on the monsoon for subsistence agriculture to make better-informed decisions.

For example, if farmers can be certain that the next season will be a drought, then they know it is not worth buying expensive fertiliser and seeds, says Richard Washington, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

The scientists hope that AMMA will also help forecast health risks throughout West Africa because diseases such as meningitis and malaria are influenced by the monsoon, says Doug Parker, meteorology professor at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom, and a UK coordinator for AMMA.

These forecasts are now being prepared in Burkina Faso and Senegal.

Parker says that the dust that arrives in West Africa during the dry season triggers meningitis outbreaks. The threat of meningitis subsides with the onset of the rainy season — when malaria outbreaks rise.

Gathering the data

The initial AMMA data collection project focused on the wet region of the Sahel. A separate programme called Fennec built on AMMA to collect data for the first time from the drier region of the central Sahara that plays a key role in influencing the West African monsoon.

Central Sahara was an “enormous blank on our climatic map of the continent”, says Parker.

“We got an excellent dataset from a place [central Sahara] where there was almost nothing before, which will be part of the process of getting the [climate] models to work better over the region,” says Washington, who led Fennec.

Washington says that Fennec was difficult because of civil unrest in northern Mali, where they could not deploy instruments, and southern Algeria, where travel is still impossible without a military escort.
Despite the difficulties, Fennec researchers managed to install six automatic weather stations throughout ‘the empty quarter’ of central Sahara and two ‘supersites’ — a large collection of high specification instruments — on the Algerian-Mali border and in Mauritania during the summer of 2011 and 2012.

“One circuit to deploy the weather stations took 26 days by car through regions that are extremely difficult to get through. And doing that in the heat of summer when the temperatures get up into the mid-40s [centigrade] every day is dangerous work. The circuit is several thousand kilometres off-road — it’s hard work,” Washington tells SciDev.Net.

The scientists also flew a jet for more than 200 hours into regions where dust storms were raging, which “is pretty scary and makes you feel ill”, says Washington.

Moving West and East

Another programme inspired by AMMA is DACCIWA (Dynamics-aerosol-chemistry-cloud interactions in West Africa), an extension of the AMMA network that is looking at climatic processes in West African coastal regions, such as the impact of high pollution levels on the timing and formation of the monsoon.

“The AMMA project has achieved amazing things against a very complicated background of logistics, politics and science. Essentially it’s the definitive dataset at the moment for providing insight into climatic processes in the region,” says Mathew Evans from the University of York, United Kingdom, who is involved with DACCIWA.

“We’re much more interested in the area close to the coast where people are living, and looking at the interaction between human emissions and the impact of that on health, vegetation and the climate.”

AMMA has also inspired a project in East Africa that wishes to follow its good example of integration and management, according to Parker. The Hydroclimate project for Lake Victoria (HYVIC), which aims to improve climatic predictability in the Lake Victoria basin, will be launched later this year.